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Googling has turned up little to nothing.

I need to develop some heavy stuff in m4 and I'd love to do it in my favorite environment with all the bells and whistles thereof.

There are packages for running m4 on just about every platform, such as windows. So I know at the very least I can create a default project and test from the CLI. But I'd rather not :)

Keith Twombley
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  • This is not the macro-language you're looking for. You can go about your business. (waving hands) :-) – JesperE Nov 26 '08 at 10:18

4 Answers4

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I'm not aware of any specific editing support for m4. However, if you have some time to spare (!) and the BNF for m4, then you could use Xtext (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xtext) to create a syntax-coloring and -completing editor, with an outline view.

Updated an answer below suggests that m4 doesn't have a BNF, or is not BNeFfable, and certainly a short search of the literature shows no claims that an m4 BNF is available - and it appears, though not explicitly stated, that the m4 language is inexpressible in this way.

Obviously this negates my suggestion, so I must retract it, unless of course Xtext has been extended to deal with such languages. Consult the Xtext website linked above for FAQs and mailing list links.

Oisin Hurley
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  • I don't think M4 has a BNF. It is Turing complete, and conditional definition of macros means that the syntax is in general unpredictable unless the editor contains an M4 interpreter within it. – Demi Feb 21 '14 at 01:32
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Unfortunately, just syntax coloring will be of little help - you need something that's capable of interpreting m4 because unless defines are processed you can't tell if it's just a word or a predefined macro. mc (Midnight Commander) has some rudimentary highlighting for m4, you might take a look at that.

m1tk4
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You can also try colorer for Eclipse (http://colorer.sourceforge.net/eclipsecolorer/) — it almost certainly supports m4 syntax (though I did not check).

Andrey Tarantsov
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If you are familiar with (and like) vim, you could try out Eclim and then setup syntax highlighting for m4.

waffleman
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